In middle age, the search giant’s motto has gone from ‘Don’t be evil’ to something more like ‘Get real.’

Everybody’s got to grow up sometime. For Alphabet Inc.’s Google, that transition from youthful idealism to crusty, middle-age realism is in full swing.

The latest evidence of Google’s pragmatic side is its Dragonfly project, a version of its search engine that would conform to China’s strict censorship, so that Google can bring search back to that country after abandoning it in 2010. But this is hardly the first example of Google’s “Don’t be evil” approach morphing into something more like “Get real.” (Even that famous motto...

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